The Anti-Excusers

National Review, Oct 27, 2003 by Jay Nordlinger

No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom (Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $26)

Odd that Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom should be considered big conservatives today. Mrs. Thernstrom spent the first part of her career as an earnest liberal, a civil-rightsy liberal. Mr. Thernstrom is a history professor at Harvard, and a winner of the Bancroft prize (the number-one award in the writing of American history). I don't mean to shock you, but they usually don't give the Bancroft prize to conservatives. And, indeed, the book for which Mr. Thernstrom won-The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis (1973)-is not exactly a conservative tract.

When I was a student under Mr. Thernstrom in the 1980s, I did not detect a rumbling conservatism. I recall that he said to me one day, "I see that you're interested in conservatism, Jay-have you tried talking to Ed Banfield?" (meaning, the great political scientist who wrote The Unheavenly City). But Professor Thernstrom was a fair and broad-minded historian and teacher, and he did assign one book by Thomas Sowell. He knew that his students should be familiar with that extraordinary man's work.

It is, to me, the most touching thing about the Thernstroms' current book-No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning-that it is dedicated to Sowell: "for his pioneering scholarship and unflagging courage." It is a perfect dedication, in its wording and in its matching of book to dedicatee.

So, did the Thernstroms move right, or did American politics- particularly the Left-just go sort of crazy on them? Probably some of each. Reagan loved to tell audiences, "I didn't leave the Democratic party-the Democratic party left me." That was a little too pat, but there was some truth to it. Both Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom took hard looks at the country as it stood in the '80s and '90s and found themselves roughly in the conservative camp.

And I make my usual point that it takes amazingly little to qualify as "conservative" these days. This couple has clung to their old values, in particular their love of E pluribus unum and their hatred of racial inequality. Their passion in this direction is probably more intense than ever. But their analyses and arguments are deeply offensive to the Left as it has developed, and they have therefore been made pariahs by their old crowd.

No Excuses is a follow-on to their monumental America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (1997). In it, they explore the awful but critical question of why "non-Asian minorities"-that is to say, blacks and Hispanics, though particularly blacks-lag so far behind others in learning. It is their conviction that "the racial gap in academic achievement is an educational crisis," and also "the main source of ongoing racial inequality"-which is "America's great unfinished business." They say that "for too long," this gap has been treated as "a dirty secret-something to whisper about behind closed doors. As if it were racist to say we have a problem."

How bad is it? Extremely bad. By the time senior year in high school rolls around, black kids "are typically four years behind white and Asian students, while Hispanics are doing only a tad better." In other words, "these students are finishing high school with a junior high education."

Oh, they're receiving a high-school diploma, all right, and they're enrolling in college-in very large numbers. But because they are ill prepared, a comedown awaits: the misery of failure, resentment, and stunted life opportunities. And the Thernstroms make clear that time alone will not heal this national condition: The racial gap in education has worsened severely over the last decade and a half. Politicians, voters, educators, and parents-and students themselves- will have to make a decision to do better.

The Thernstroms maintain that nothing works like standards, testing, and accountability (which happen to compose a mantra for President George W. Bush). The couple takes on the enemies of testing, who include the education writer for the New York Times who sniffed, "There is no standardized test for tolerance" ("tolerance" being a holy grail in the modern education biz, along with "diversity"). Yes, but there are standardized tests for reading and math, without which life can be intolerable.

Not wishing to paint a picture of total bleakness, the authors devote a section to "Great Teaching"-to schools that should be models for others. All of them involve more instruction, more parental cooperation (or at least non-obstruction), less nonsense. Also, these schools are more orderly-saner even in a physical way. They present an atmosphere conducive to learning. Trash is picked up, graffiti are effaced, and students dress decently. The famous "broken windows" theory applies in education, as elsewhere. Kids are made to look others in the eye, to say "please" and "thank you," and to be on time. They are required to behave in ways that used to be unremarkable.